The following articles were published in "The Guardian", newspaper of the Communist Party of Australia in its issue of Wednesday, March 7th, 2001. Contact address: 65 Campbell Street, Surry Hills. Sydney. 2010 Australia. Phone: (612) 9212 6855 Fax: (612) 9281 5795. CPA Central Committee: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "The Guardian": <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Webpage: http://www.cpa.org.au> Subscription rates on request. ****************************** For whom the roads toll The greed-soaked debacle that is the privately owned Burnley tunnel, which runs under Melbourne's Yarra River, has all the earmarks of sleaze and corruption people have come to know and despise in the era of free market economics and privatisation. For almost a decade under the former Kennett Liberal Government much of the major new road infrastructure in Melbourne was designed to force motorists off public roads and onto toll ways: a toll road in and of itself cannot generate the profits demanded by the owners, in this case Transurban. by Marcus Browning Transurban owns City Link, which includes the Burnley tunnel, a project literally built on shifting foundations, i.e. constructed on a floodplain. The project was opened by proclamation of the Bracks Labor Government last December, despite questions by an inspector, Max Lay, who sounded a warning, "Part of my reluctance to act in the past has been to say ... until the groundwater is back you really don't know how the thing will perform." Under pressure from Transurban, the Bracks Government changed the contract with Transurban so that the tunnel could be opened to traffic. Then last month it was closed indefinitely after cracks appeared in a wall and water began pouring in. Transurban, as expected, denies everything. "The worst thing that could happen is what happened on Monday and that is we got water in the tunnel", said the consortium's managing director Kim Edwards. "I'm not happy with it, but there was no safety issue." Describing motorists as "customers who have been forced to sit in traffic snarls", Edwards complained that Transurban was losing $100,000 a day because of the closure of the tunnel. His estimation of the safety of the tunnel did not accord with the view of the Victorian Trades Hall Council, which had the Victorian Workcover Authority address safety concerns for workers brought in to repair the cracks the in the wall. Safety barriers were set up and an industrial hygienist was brought in to monitor the air quality in the tunnel. There was a second engineer's report outlining the specifics of the repairs needed to seal the leaks. The Trades Hall also gained an assurance that the Workcover Authority would have a permanent presence on the site. The powerful vested interests involved and their connection with government was highlighted by Kenneth Davidson in his column in "The Age" newspaper (22.2.01). Macquarie Bank was a bond investor in City Link, it was paid $25 million for advice on the structuring of the company and sold its equity before City Link opened for business. The Treasurer in the Kennett Government, Alan Stockdale, had negotiated the deal between the government and City Link. In 1999, as election disaster loomed, Stockdale announced he was resigning from the government and taking a position with the Macquarie Bank - as chairman of its Melbourne Assets and Infrastructure arm. Davidson notes that if the government had been responsible for the project instead of the private sector, "their engineers would have taken a far less cavalier attitude to the building of the tunnel, because they would have been thinking in terms of structures, not short-term profits". Adding to the growing mountain of reasons for maintaining vital infrastructure in public hands, it now appears that the Victorian people will pay for a lengthy legal battle and may have to hand over $36 million to Transurban which is suing the Government over another section of the City Link tollway. To avoid the City Link toll road, motorists are using a publicly built road, the West Gate Freeway. Transurban says that "as a result, thousands of vehicles are not using City Link each day". *************************************************************** -- Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Archived at http://www.cat.org.au/lists/leftlink/ Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=subscribe%20leftlink Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20leftlink
